No Good Choices
by ncisnewbie
Summary: How does the team react to a case that hits close to home?


If you don't like the worldviews the characters express, just remember the title.

Standard Disclaimers: I don't own these characters.

**Spring, 2014, The Hanna household, 9:00 pm**

Agent Sam Hanna tucked his oldest daughter, Beryl, into bed and gave her an extra kiss on the temple. Almost immediately, though, his demeanor changed and he rumbled to the liquor cabinet like a grizzly bear to a salmon stream. Without a moment's thought, he extracted the bourbon and a tumbler, and poured himself a triple. He turned to hold it up to the light, examined it for a second, took a gulp, and turned back to add two more shots.

"Samuel Todd Wilson Hanna, what," every syllable of his name rang out like a separate accusation, "do you think you're doing?"

As he looked at Michele, looks of guilt and frustration became a mask of defiance. "Rough day."

She grabbed for the bottle. "Nothing can be that rough. Give me that."

Defeated, he let her extract the bottle and return it to the cabinet, but took his glass to the sofa, where he sat down and spread across one arm rest. Michele curled up next to him, let him finish his (long) drink, then helped herself to a sip from his glass. "What happened, Honey?"

"Did you ever meet Lisa Hamilton?"

"Sure, she was a year behind me at the FBI academy."

"I had to shoot her today."

"Oh, my goodness! What happened?"

"I only winged her. Hand's in a bandage."

**Thirteen hours earlier**:

Hetty Lange ambled into the ops center, clearly interrupting some serious whisperings between Eric and Nell. She gave them a folder and explained, "LAPD has asked us to look into this since the victim is a foreign national."

Twenty minutes later, they briefed the team, sounding today more like a ping-pong dance than dueling briefers. "This is Ahmed Al-Sanjouri, twenty-three, single, on a student visa from Algeria."

"He's a member of a prominent pro-American family there."

"He was studying civil engineering at UCLA, until"

"he was shot in the alley behind a grocery store two miles from campus, three blocks from his apartment." A crime scene photo flashed onto the screen, showing the dead body beside two reusable grocery bags, their contents scattered across the asphalt.

"There's no good video surveillance of the alley, but here he is entering the alley at 2:37 last night." A grainy video showed his back as he went around a corner, followed by someone in a college warmup suit with the hood pulled up.

"This must be who did it, but we haven't gotten them on any other video," finished Eric.

"I think it's a woman," Marty Deeks ventured.

"What? How can you tell?" his partner asked.

"The hips. You see, the females of the species evolved broader hips in order to…" His explanation screeched to a halt as soon as his brain realized where his words were headed. "You know what, never mind."

Kensi erupted. "Oh my god! Here we are watching the last steps this poor kid would ever take, and you spend the time checking out his assailant's butt?"

"What can I say? I'm a detective. I detect things."

Kensi grabbed a large handful of Deeks' backside and narrowed her eyes at him. "You're gonna detect a swift kick in the touché if you can't keep your mind on the case."

"Trouble in paradise, you two?" asked Callen with a smirk.

Meanwhile, equations and diagrams flashed across the big screen until Nell spoke up. "He has a point, though. Based on Al-Sanjouri's height of six-foot-one, I've used rough calculations to figure that the assailant was about five-foot-four."

"Is that in shoes or stocking feet?" quipped Callen.

"It looks like they're both wearing tennis shoes so the height should be…" Eric defended.

Nell cut in, "It's just a rough estimate."

Sam Hanna rolled his eyes and elbowed Callen. "Geeks: they wouldn't know a joke if it landed in their cup-o-soup," was his aside. To the group he said, "Forget about it. It's enough to start a search."

"What we need to know is what happened before and after this—apparently—hit," Nell said after she recovered.

"Kensi, Deeks: you go to his apartment to see if you can find a motive. Nell, Eric: anything you can find on his backstory, and go through the video surveillance with a fine-tooth comb. Sam and I will go to the crime scene, see how the killer got away."

The team turned to leave. "Well, Fern. At least we don't have to interview the grieving widow again."

"He was single, goofball!" Kensi replied.

"Hey! Ouch!"

A little later, Callen was checking behind the dumpster in the alley when his phone rang. Nell dove right in, "We've been checking Al-Sanjouri's credit cards, and it looks like he shops at that grocery store every Monday at about two in the morning."

"Stocking up for the week when it's quiet, I guess. I like that plan. If it weren't bad tradecraft, I'd start shopping then, too."

"That's a good point. Suggests that Al-Sanjouri isn't an operative."

"LAPD had already found the shells: looks like a Ruger."

"So we're thinking the perp was a pro or an operative?"

"That would explain it. There wasn't anyone else in the store when it happened. The shooter must have been waiting in the parking lot while he shopped."

"Callen, do they archive their security cam footage? If we could look over previous shopping trips, we could see if anything else was going on."

"I'll ask 'em. We should be able to upload it to you."

* * *

An hour later, the team regrouped in ops to compare notes. Sam Hanna led off, "It looks like the alley was a common shortcut between the store and the student quarter. The perp could have parked in the next street over and just driven away after the murder." At this, Eric started typing, as images on his monitor responded to his commands. Soon an image flashed onto the big screen.

Eric introduced the video. In the distance, it showed the hooded figure at a quick trot, but still no face. "This is the shooter crossing that street after the kill…. And here's the next street." This time, it showed the figure climbing into a minivan. "Drats! They took off the plates."

"Again, makes it look like a hit," commented Callen.

Sam Hanna's voice dripped with contempt. "But a minivan? What self-respecting hitman drives a minivan?"

"Hitwoman," corrected Nell.

"In which case, it makes a more plausible cover," commented Kensi.

"Besides, you can probably fit an assault rifle into the under-seat storage, and a hand grenade in each of the seventeen cup-holders." Shaggy looked around as his soliloquy made a mid-course correction. "So is there a connection between Minivan Lady and Dead Engineer?"

"Here's what we found on surveillance video. Last week, she was waiting in the parking lot while he shopped, and two weeks ago, they met at the checkout counter. Same three weeks ago."

"Did she pay by credit card?"

"No, but at least she wasn't wearing a hoodie the first time they met."

"Who is she?"

"That's where it gets interesting, guys. It's Lisa Hamilton. She was with the FBI, married agent Mike Wadstrom, and went on leave when the children came, about four years ago."

"Is Wadstrom still active?"

"Yeah. He's transferred to the Lakewood office now."

"And they bought a house near UCLA."

Callen stepped closer to the big screen, which still showed the surveillance footage of them checking out. "Did you guys run facial rec on our victim?"

"No, his ID was in his wallet."

"What've you got, G.?" asked Sam.

Eric put the photos on the screen saying, "Here we are. It's a match to his visa, his California and Algerian driver's licenses, his Algerian passport, and even his student ID at the American School in Algiers."

Callen looked at them with furrowed brow, "There's something familiar about that face."

Eric offered, "I'll run the search again, with broader match parameters."

Images flashed across his console, and every so often another man's face would appear on the big screen.

"There!" shouted Nell pointing at the newest face that appeared. It was surrounded by a red frame, and as Eric pulled it up, they could read the caption, _Hosni Gareshi, Treasury department ten-most-wanted list 3/8/08 – 4/16/11. Born 8/21/85, died 4/16/11._

Eric sounded puzzled. "But Nell, that's only a 84% match."

Kensi was equally wary. "And he's dead anyway. Looks like somebody took him out."

"SEALS," said Sam, pointing to the accompanying report. "But how does this help us, G.?"

"I think I see where this is headed," cut in Eric. "Gareshi was a wanted man when Hamilton went on leave."

Nell continued, "She couldn't know he'd been taken out, but then bumps into his look-alike, Al-Sanjouri, at the supermarket."

Sam completed the train of reasoning. "So Hamilton killed the wrong guy."

Deeks put it in perspective. "What? She thinks she caught a major international money-launderer 'cause he was squeezin' the Charmin at two in the morning?"

Sam replied, " 'Don't squeeze the Charmin,' Mr. Whipple wasn't kidding around!"

Callen sounded a little defensive as he summarized, "It's just a working theory. Let's flesh it out before we confront her. She's got family, probably not a flight risk."

Eric put a fresh video on the screen. "Right: Afternoon preschool just started for her oldest. Here she is dropping him off. Oh, and she's got the plates back on her van."

"Let's bring her supervisor to the boatshed, see what we can find out about her."

With Sam Hanna sitting across from him, FBI Special Agent In Charge Vince Marshall spread across the sofa in the boatshed, incongruously comfortable as a murder investigation zeroed in on one of his own. "Sure, I was sorry to see her go. She made Wadstrom a better agent just by marrying him, but then she got into this whole 'biological clock' thing, and we lost her to motherhood."

Callen asked, "Is Agent Hamilton…"

"Mrs. Wadstrom," Marshall interrupted.

Callen persisted, "Is she on leave of absence?"

"Leaves of absence expire after twenty-one months. When she didn't come back after that, we had to let her go."

Sam sounded shocked. "That's it? No allowances?"

"You wouldn't believe what I had to do just 'cause Wadstrom couldn't keep it in his pants. I wrote a whole memo to get her permission to exhaust her accrued sick leave and vacation time before the twenty-one months started. And besides, she got almost two extra days because her leave started May 1, so it included only one February. On top of that, that was a leap year, so that's almost three extra days."

"You wrote a whole extra memo?" Sam asked sarcastically. "My heart bleeds for you."

"The best you can do is _let_ her take her own sick leave? She had a toddler still in diapers."

Agent Hanna summarized, "She's a highly trained law enforcement agent."

"Was"

Undeterred, he persisted. "It cost this country, your country, over a million dollars to train her. And you want to throw that away just because there's nothing in the manual to cover her taking care of her own flesh-and-blood children?"

Callen stood behind the sofa, fuming. Fortunately, the monitor sprang to life, Eric's face dominating one window, as if he'd stuck his head into some wormhole.

"Sorry to interrupt, guys, but you're gonna wanna see this."

As he pulled back from the camera, another window opened, showing one of the news feeds. "Breaking reports out of Brentwood. Ahmed Al-Sanjouri, twenty-three, a UCLA Engineering student from Algeria, was killed last night. His father is a leader of the Peace and Progress party in Algeria, which had just gained a majority in parliament for its pro-American stance. Police and federal authorities are investigating."

Marshall commented, "And I thought he was just some Arab kid trying to export our technology."

"Actually, he came to UCLA to work with a professor who's a pioneer in getting freshwater from sea water," cut in Eric.

Sam continued, "See, to help his country grow its own food. Keep his countrymen from starving."

Callen brought them back to the current situation. "Now that it's on the news everywhere, now that she realizes she shot the wrong guy, she'll go under cover. We need to pick her up now."

Marshall sounded magnanimous. "I'll come along. I may be able to talk to her."

Kensi, watching from the ops center, observed, "That's the last thing we need."

Deeks agreed, "Right. If he were trying to talk me back from a ledge, I'd rather go over, just so I didn't have to deal with him."

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, Kensi's Malibu, Sam's Charger, and Marshall's Expedition descended on the Hamilton-Wadstrom household. As Sam made his way to the garage and Kensi and Deeks circled to the back yard, Marshall and Callen marched up the front steps. "Federal Agents. Come out with your hands up!"

No response. When Vince Marshall slammed his shoulder against the door, it disintegrated, hurtling him into a waiting headlock from little Lisa Hamilton. He doubled over, though, tumbling her across his back and onto the floor. Hamilton kept pulling, bringing his head squarely through the foyer's drywall.

From the floor she kicked. Her shoe grazed the inside of his thigh, which steered the force directly to his groin. She slid out from under him, sprang to her feet, and grabbed his arm, twisting it behind his back until it popped. She turned him to use his body as a shield from Callen's bullets.

Callen tried to calm the situation. "We don't need any trouble here. We just need to ask you some questions."

Unfortunately, it was Marshall who replied. "What are you doing negotiating? Shoot the crazy…"

Hamilton took advantage of the dissention by breaking toward the kitchen, dragging Marshall as far as the arch of the hall. Together, they were too wide to fit down the hall, so she banged his head—one last time—into the wall before releasing. She dashed through the kitchen and into the garage, pulling her pistol from her belt as she went. As she burst into the garage, she caught sight of Sam Hanna waiting with pistol drawn. The minivan, backed into the garage, offered protection as she ran behind, opened the driver's-side door, and squeezed off three wayward shots.

By this time Callen had clambered over Marshall's crumpled form and emerged from the kitchen. She turned to shoot him and her hand, braced against the windshield, became a perfect disarming target for Sam.

Automatically, he took the shot, shattering both hand bones and windshield.

* * *

Her hand in bulky bandages and splints, Lisa Hamilton sulked at Kensi Blye in the interview room in the boatshed. Detective Deeks paced behind his partner's chair as they tried to get the complete statement. Outside the room, Agents Callen and Hanna watched on the monitor.

"You saw Al-Sanjouri and you thought he was Gareshi." Kensi flung the two slightly different pictures onto the table.

Deeks continued, "You couldn't get any response at the FBI, so you hunted him down, and you shot him!"

"Why? What were you thinking?" she asked.

"He was a terrorist."

"But he wasn't!"

"He was an engineering student at UCLA."

"And pro-American."

"Relaxed with his friends by playing the trumpet in a jazz band."

"Volunteered at the soup kitchen."

Deeks leaned down to read the file, resting his left hand on the left side of Kensi's chair. He completed her sentence. "At the Unitarian _Church_."

"How was I supposed to know that?"

"You weren't. It wasn't your job."

"It was…. Used to be. It used to be I'd make a ten-million-dollar drug bust before lunch, get back on the street and catch a bank robber before dinner. Now, it's just an endless cycle of diaper changes, play dates, and grocery runs."

Deeks stood back up, dragging his hand up Kensi's arm and along her shoulder. She turned to give him a smile. Lisa watched, and then a smile of triumph broke across her face. "You'll see what I mean, Agent Blye. He's all 'sweet' and 'wonderful,' all 'supportive' and all that junk, but as soon as you drop a litter of his spawn, suddenly he 'didn't think through' how hard parenting is. His 'little bundle of joy' will become your vicious taskmaster and will tear your relationship to shreds! He'll land himself extra surveillance duties, just to get out of the house! So, yeah, when I recognized him as Gareshi, I told Mike and called the local field office. They blew me off."

Deeks was the first to recover from her tirade, so he continued her thought. " 'Cause Gareshi was dead already, but it was all very classified, so they couldn't tell you."

"You wouldn't believe how frustrating it is, now that I'm out of the loop. I've still got the training, and I know what we were working on when I left, but to be just discarded like that… it hurt." After staring at the ceiling for a while, she took a minute to study the Venetian blinds, but then her shoulders slumped as she shook her head. "I shot the wrong man…the wrong man…a bad shoot."

* * *

The team gathered in the bullpen after the case was closed, and compared notes for the coming evening. Callen asked, "Anyone up for a beer?"

"Sorry, G. I promised Michele I'd be home on time tonight."

Kensi looked at her partner, then answered, "Sorry, we're having a quiet night tonight."

Deeks looked up, "I like the sound of that! Say no more!"

Sam rolled his eyes, and said, "Down, boy!"

"I said 'quiet night,' Deeks!"

* * *

Later that night, Kensi and Deeks lounged on her sofa after finishing a take-out pizza. He grabbed for her hands, trying to pull her up. "Come on to bed, Kensalicious."

She resisted. "I'm sorry, Marty. I'm just thinking about what Lisa Hamilton said."

"What, that whole 'litter of my spawn' thing? 'Cause I don't think I like the comparisons there. Am I a dog? They have litters. Or am I the devil, cause he's one of the few we talk about 'spawn' of. That and fish, and I eat lots of fish, but myself I don't spawn. Maybe I'm a devil dog. That could work."

Kensi turned away, sideways on the couch. " 'Devil Dogs' is a nickname the Marines have had since World War One, you heathen. Don't you dare put yourself in that company!"

"Oooh, harsh! What put you in this mood, Wikipedia?"

Kensi just glared, so he sat back down. "How could Lisa Hamilton's one honest mistake get under your skin so much?" He rested his hand on her cheek, and she nuzzled against it.

"Yeah, it's just that she painted a picture of what things could be like for me…for us." She paused, and took a sip of her nearly full, nearly flat beer. "I've always wanted to be a federal agent, but that shouldn't mean I have to sacrifice family life for it."

"Right, it shouldn't. And you should be able to continue your career through your parenting just as much as I should."

"But I don't want to be a bad parent."

"You won't be. I've seen bad parents, and you're not one of them: never will be, not by a long shot."

"Don't give me that. I know I won't be a criminally bad parent, but I don't want to be even a slightly bad parent."

"You won't be even slightly bad. You'll be the best parent ever, 'cause your Kensi, and you do everything awesome."

"It isn't a contest, Marty. I don't want to be the best; I just want to be honestly good." She slouched lower on the sofa. "But, … but I'm exhausted as is. I can't imagine coming home from a day like today by way of some daycare center, then struggling to get a child into bed. Or homework. God help me when it comes to helping with homework."

"I'd be there, too, Kens. Count on me to help."

He tried to pull her into him, but she pushed away from him with surprising vehemence. " 'Help'? That's all you'd do is 'help'? I don't want your 'help.' I want you to do fifty percent, not as a favor to me, but 'cause it's part of parenting. It's fifty percent your kid, so it'll be fifty percent your job!"

The detective sat, recoiling from the reprimand. But then, Martin Deeks, Counselor at Law, perked up. " 'It is,' 'it will be'?" he quoted. "The simple present tense and simple future tense. Not 'it would be,' which is conditional. Kensi Blye, do you have some news for me?"

She just rolled her eyes. "No, no, no! Don't go there… especially not tonight. I'm not pregnant; It just slipped out."

"Okay, Kens. I'm sorry. I just jumped the gun. Got distracted." He cuddled her into his chest. "I'm sorry." After five minutes of silence thawing between them, a 747 on final approach disturbed their reverie, and they quietly padded off to bed.

* * *

"Lisa Hamilton," said Sam Hanna, as much to his bourbon as to his wife. "She married Mike Wadstrom a few years ago."

"Mike was in that class, too," Michele chipped in.

"FBI cut her loose after their kids came. Vince Marshall was her super. Then she meets this kid who looks like somebody who was on the ten-most-wanted list, and she ambushed him in an alley. Basically a case of a bad shoot."

"Vince Marshall. He's a piece of work. More than once, I wanted to knee that sexist piece of hmmm in the groin." For Michele Hanna, Memory Lane was not all a happy place.

"Will a kick work? That's what Hamilton landed there. He's at Mercy General tonight, just for observation."

"He probably deserved it, so I can't say I'm sorry for him." She grabbed for his bourbon. "But what got you in this mood? You're normally so healthy."

He pulled the bourbon out of her reach. "It's what she said afterward that got me, about life after the Bureau. Gave me more sympathy for you."

"It's not 'after the Bureau' for me: I'm going back."

"In fact you've already been back. Helped us get Sidorov." He paused and shook his head. "But the changes as you take time out for kids. I just can't imagine them."

"Well, maybe this will help you understand. Barney used to be the code name for a North Korean double agent. Now, he just covers for me while I fold the laundry."

They chuckled. "Yeah. It sounded like she was going stir-crazy with the parenting thing. After she saw this guy, she kinda took on a secret identity."

"What? Mild-mannered play-date mommy by day, secret agent by night?"

"Basically," Sam confirmed. They sat quietly for a while, while Sam nursed on his drink. "Now that Cora is in first grade, we should start looking at what we'll do when you go back to the Bureau."

"Yeah. I've been thinking about that, ever since the night in the hotel on the Sidorov case."

"You did seem to get a charge out of undercover life," Sam said with a smirk.

"Not the way that you did." She ran a hand over his chest.

"Ooh. Low blow, Honey!" But he laughed.

After a minute, Michele broke the silence. "And we do need to start saving for college and retirement. I was an agent first and a mother second. Law enforcement is what I do."

"Just like I do. We knew this time would come when we decided to start having kids. I just didn't think it would come so soon." They sat for a while, Sam still studying his glass, Michele staring at the lego that had escaped its bin in the corner.

"Your Mom was so worried when we were on the same op," Michele finally said.

"You told her?"

"She figured it out. I seemed to have known too much about your injuries after we took down Sidorov."

"She'd make a good detective."

"Miss Marple, Jessica Fletcher, Hetty Wainthrop, and Beryl Hanna: she'd be in good company." Another comfortable laugh.

"She has a good point though," Sam confirmed. "It'd be bad enough if something were to happen to one of us, but both of us? What would happen to the kids?"

"We've already got the wills written."

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean I've got to like it." Sam shook his head. "Cora is just so energetic that I think she'd wear Mamma out. Little Ber, too."

"Little Ber isn't so little any more, either. There's a note from school in the roll-top. They just started the 'family life' unit."

"That's a scary thought." He punctuated his remark with a large draw from his drink. "Mamma's not ready to go through parenting a teenager again, either."

"She's a good kid. I don't think she'll give too much trouble on that."

"Me neither. It's just, I think we should be the ones there to help them through…all of it." He waved his glass expansively.

Finally, Sam took the last sip of his bourbon. He set the glass on the end table and pulled Michele closer. "On the other hand, I'd hate not having your back."

Michele pulled away so she could look square at him. "I can take care of myself!"

"Said the woman who ended up hanging from sheet plastic twenty stories up!" In the shocked silence, he rubbed his knuckles. "No, that was low. That was the bourbon talking. What I meant was I know you can. It's just that I know how callous the Bureau was with you last time. And the statistics are that careless partners can't be reformed. The partners of sixty percent of all injured agents have been written up for careless conduct before."

They sat for a while, but then Michele stood up and reached for Sam's hands. "C'mon to bed. We need to think about this some more."

* * *

The next morning, Sam sprawled into the chair before Hetty's desk, water bottle in hand and aspirin already at work. Instead of greeting him, she narrowed her eyes. "I tend to prefer black China tea, Mr. Hanna, but for your condition, I'm inclined to recommend a blend of Barnstead peppermint and Saxony chamomile."

He just nodded. Once Hetty's tea ceremony was completed, Sam took a sip, and then broke the silence. "I'm starting to worry about Michele going back to the Bureau. I'd like her to be safe and have a good partner, and we're both concerned about being in the field at the same time."

"I thought that was it." She reached into a folder on her desk and extracted a paper. "Perhaps this will interest you, then. It seems that after the problems with Blackwater in Afghanistan, and with Inman out here, FLETC is reluctant to outsource tactical training much longer: too much opportunity for foul play. The NSC is recommending that FLETC set up its own TRP school. It turns out they're the ones who hold the lease on Inman's facility, so if they saw the right proposal, it could end up out here."

It took an inordinate effort for Sam to furrow his brow in skepticism, "Yeah, but Michele?"

"Would be very welcome here, and you'd be exceptional leading the TRP's and teaching advanced hand-to-hand." Sam's eyes widened, so Hetty continued. "Considering your condition, Ms. Jones will be going into the field with Mr. Callen today, because I'd like a draft proposal on my desk by the close of business."

The news chased the bloodshoot out of Sam's eyes more effectively than all the chamomile in all the world.


End file.
